1. Bosch, D., ‘Your Will Be Done? Critical Reflections on San Antonio’, Missionalia 17.2 (1989), pp. 126–38 (137).Google Scholar

2. Bosch, D., Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Mission Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991).Google Scholar

3. Bosch, , Transforming Mission, p. 368.Google Scholar

4. Bosch, , Transforming Mission, p. 472.Google Scholar

5. Bosch, D., Believing in the Future: Towards a Missiology of Western Culture (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1995), p. 60.Google Scholar

6. Hake, A., ‘Theological Reflections on “Community”’, in Harvey, A. (ed.), Theology in the City: A Theological Response to ‘Faith in the City’ (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 47–67 (47).Google Scholar

7. Morton, T., ‘Beware the C-word’, Sydney Morning Herald — Spectrum, 4 11 2000, pp. 1, 10–11 (1).Google Scholar

8. For discussions of this kind of anthropological analysis of cultural differences, see Malina, B., The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 63–73Google Scholar; Law, E.H.F., The Wolf Shall Lie Down with the Lamb: A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community (St Louis: Chalice Press, 1993), pp. 13–27Google Scholar; and also Giles, K., What on Earth Is the Church? A Biblical and Theological Enquiry (Melbourne: HarperCollins Dove, 1995), pp. 19–22.Google Scholar

9. See Bosch, , ‘Your Will Be Done?’, p. 137.Google Scholar

10. Schattenmann, J., ‘Κοινϖνια’, NIDNTT, I, p. 643.Google Scholar

11. Giles, , What on Earth Is the Church?, p. 16.Google Scholar

12. Guder, D. et al. , Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 233.Google Scholar The argument of Atkins, R.A., Egalitarian Community: Ethnography and Exegesis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1991)Google Scholar using Mary Douglas's grid-group model, that Pauline communities were egalitarian small groups, characterized by high group, low grid behaviours, and the possible implications of that for the formation of missional communities in postmodern contexts, is beyond the scope of this paper, but would be worth exploring, not least in the context of cultures with high group/high grid or low group/low grid characteristics.

13. Gunton, C., ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in Gunton, C.E. and Hardy, D.W. (eds.), On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 48–80.Google Scholar

14. Docker, J., Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

15. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 38.Google Scholar

16. Newbigin, L., Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Geneva: WCC, 1986)Google Scholar; Bosch, , Transforming Mission, pp. 262–67Google Scholar; Guder, et al. , Missional Church, pp. 18–36Google Scholar; Bellah, R., ‘Cultural Barriers to the Understanding of the Church and Its Public Role’, Missiology 19.4 (1991), pp. 461–73Google Scholar; and Middleton, J.R. and Walsh, B.J., Truth Is Stranger Than it Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1995), pp. 9–27.Google Scholar

17. With Page, R., God Is with Us: Synergy in the Church (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 4Google Scholar, I use ‘postmodernity’, describing a lived experience, rather than ‘postmodernism’ which refers more to an intellectual movement in art, architecture, literature, etc.

18. Page, , God Is with Us, p. 32.Google Scholar

19. Among Christians, responses to postmodernity have ranged from critically friendly to hostile. Among the former, Middleton, and Walsh, , Truth Is Stranger Than it Used to BeGoogle Scholar and Grierson, D., ‘A New Path to the Waterfall’, interMission 4.1 (1998), pp. 9–21 are examples.Google Scholar

20. See Newbigin, , Foolishness to the GreeksGoogle Scholar, and West, C.C., Power, Truth and the Community in Modern Culture (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), pp. 65–71.Google Scholar

21. See Gunton, , ‘The Church on Earth’, pp. 48–54.Google Scholar

22. See Page, , God Is with Us, pp. 10–19.Google Scholar

23. See Bosch, , Transforming Mission, pp. 1–8.Google Scholar

24. MISSIO, Anglicans in Mission: A Transforming Journey (London: SPCK, 2000), p. 21.Google Scholar I must declare my interest: as a member of the NCCA's Commission on Mission at the time, I had a substantial hand in drafting the statement. MISSIO offered it as an alternative to the Anglican Consultative Council's well-known but missiologically inadequate ‘Five marks of mission’ (pp. 19–21).

25. L.A. Hoedemaker has raised valid questions about the usefulness of the missio Dei concept. See ‘The People of God and the Ends of the Earth’, in Verstraelen, F.J., Camps, A., Hoedemaker, L.A. and Spindler, M.R. (eds.), Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction. Texts and Contexts of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 157–71, esp. 162–66.Google Scholar Perhaps his concerns can be met if we insist on giving central place to the New Testament vision of ‘the reign of God’ in the missio Dei – a theological emphasis which has often been lost, as Hoedemaker himself notes. The NCCA definition, I believe, clearly retains this emphasis.

26. An assignment in the Diploma missiology course of the Theological Education by Extension College of Southern Africa (TEEC) during 2000 asked the question, ‘Is mission a programme of the church, or the church a programme of mission?’ As I marked the students' answers, I was dismayed, but not surprised, by the number who saw mission as a programme of the church.

27. See Schreiter, R.J., Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992).Google Scholar

28. ‘An entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community’, quoted in Küng, H., Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 131.Google Scholar

29. Küng, , Theology for the Third Millennium, pp. 131–32.Google Scholar

30. For example, Mead, L.B., The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier (Washington DC: Alban Institute, 1991)Google Scholar; Greenwood, R., Transforming Priesthood: A New Theology of Mission and Ministry (London: SPCK, 1994)Google Scholar; Warren, R., Being Human: Being Church: Spirituality and Mission in the Local Church (London: Marshall Pickering, 1995)Google Scholar; Page, R., God Is with Us: Synergy in the Church (London: SCM Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Bevans, S., ‘A Spirituality of American Priesthood: Implications Emerging from Our Sense of Mission’, paper presented at the Consultation of the Spirituality of the American (Catholic) Priesthood,St Mary's University Centre for Continuing Formation,Baltimore, MD,2001.Google Scholar

31. Yates, T., ‘Anglicans in Mission’, in Sykes, S. and Booty, J. (eds.), The Study of Anglicanism (London: SPCK, 1988), pp. 429–41.Google Scholar

32. Cf. Allen, R., Missionary Methods: St Paul's or Ours? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2nd edn, 1992).Google Scholar

33. For a good discussion of the tensions that this created between a mission agency and the local bishop, see Davidson, A.K.'s essay on ‘culture and ecclesiology’ in nineteenth-century New Zealand in Ward, K. and Stanley, B. (eds.), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns; Cambridge: Richmond Curzon Press, 1999), esp. pp. 210–16.Google Scholar

34. Wasdell, D., ‘The Evolution of Missionary Congregations’, International Review of Missions 66.3 (1977), pp. 366–72 (367)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McCoy, M.J., ‘“Local Church” in Missiological Perspective: An Enquiry’, MTh, University of South Africa, 1993, pp. 80–81.Google Scholar

35. Morgan, E.R. and Lloyd, R. (eds.), The Mission of the Anglican Communion (London: SPCK/SPG, 1948), pp. 1–17Google Scholar, and see MISSIO, Anglicans in Mission, p. 22.Google Scholar

36. McCoy, , ‘Local Church’, pp. 71–74.Google Scholar

37. Nieder-Heitmann, J., ‘The Gospel and Our Culture Network in North America: Translating the Challenge in the South African Context’, Missionalia 30.3 (2002), pp. 443–72.Google Scholar

38. Note especially Chapter 4 and see also Dietterich, P. and Dietterich, I., A Systems Model of the Church in Ministry and Mission (Chicago: Centre for Parish Development, 1994), pp. 6–11.Google Scholar

39. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 128Google Scholar and see the whole of his Chapter 5.

40. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, Chapter 6.Google Scholar

41. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 183Google Scholar and see his Chapter 7.

42. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, Chapter 8.Google Scholar

43. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, Chapter 9.Google Scholar

44. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, pp. 183–220.Google Scholar Although the whole book is jointly owned by the team which produced it, each chapter is the work of one particular member. Chapter 7 was drafted by Alan Roxburgh, who, the year before Missional Church appeared, issued a book dealing with the missionary congregation as a liminal community, and setting out ideas about the character of its leadership (Roxburgh, A.J., The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality [Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997])Google Scholar. His contribution to Missional Church, while not directly dealing with the issue of liminality, considerably develops the ecclesiological dimensions implicit in the earlier book.

45. Winter, R.D., ‘The Two Structures of God's Redemptive Mission’, Missiology 2.1 (1974), pp. 121–39.Google Scholar

46. See British Council of Churches, ‘Young People and the Church: The Report of a Working Party Set Up by the BCC Youth Unit’ (London: British Council of Churches, 1981), pp. 32–41.Google Scholar

47. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 204.Google Scholar

48. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 206.Google Scholar

49. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 208.Google Scholar

50. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 212Google Scholar, see the diagram at p. 213.

51. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 247.Google Scholar

52. Stephen Bevans has pointed out to me that he prefers the phrase communionin-mission. ‘The word ‘communion’ is kind of a ‘catholic’ word. The GOCN's ‘missional community’ sounds a bit ‘Protestant’ to Catholic ears!’ (e-mail note, 7 March 2001). However, the ecclesiological emphasis is very much the same.

53. Kuhn, quoted in Küng, , Theology for the Third Millennium, p. 131.Google Scholar

54. Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 179.Google Scholar

55. Page, , God Is with Us, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

56. Quoted in Guder, et al. , Missional Church, p. 182.Google Scholar

57. The missional ecclesiology and the associated training material developed by the (Roman Catholic) Lumko Institute in South Africa offers creative and contextual answers to these questions. They have been taken up in a number of Anglican dioceses in Southern Africa. See Prior, L.P., Towards a Community Church: The Way Ahead for Today's Parish (Delmenville: Lumko Institute, 2nd edn, 1997)Google Scholar for a popular version of the Lumko Institute's framework. Prior, L.P., A Communion of Communities. The Mission and Growth of a Local Church as Reflected in the Lumko Institute, MTh, University of South Africa, 1993, gives a fuller scholarly account.Google Scholar